The sunlight today is an act of violence,
Arrows slicing the clouds to ribbons
Such awesome and terrible storms of light,
Bright and ragged banners streaming
Battle cries thundering along the channels
Of the raging winds.

I once laid in a fever, between dream and vision
The roof above my head ripped away
The vaults of the night sky split
As overripe fruit, edges ragged as wounds
The pulp and pith of the heavens
A yawning, hungry, pure flame.

Angels peered over the edges,
Mouths bloody, teeth wicked and sharp
Wings of blackened, pitted iron spreading
A rustling of edges and rust
Hungry, feral, carrion birds eying their feast
Beautiful the way a naked blade is still lovely.

Frozen to the sweat soaked sheets
Bones the kindling for the fire set in my flesh
Unmoving, tears burning canyons into my cheeks
For the first time feeling the death in me,
Printed upon each cell as blackletter,
A whispering mirrored by the watchers’ lips,
As threads sewn beneath the skin,
Tied and knotted, a skein, a tapestry.

The fever broke, yet still I feel the tugging,
Still out of the corner of my eye
Wings beat at the shadows
Pinned beneath all my words,
All the brutal blood and sex and mortality
Tainting blue skies and sunlight
So that I will never not see the tooth marks left
By God’s terrible instruments.

I died at sea
Felt the ice cold waters
Fill my lungs with salt
We are all always returning
To salt water, curling in upon ourselves
Falling and falling and falling
Into the dark, into the safe,
Retreating with every last breath.

The grey green swells
Are a vast potter’s field
Womb or mausoleum
Vault of bones, ribs, spines
Whispering reverence, vaulted
Buttressed, a cathedral
Tolling great clangor of depths
Without memory or the need of it.

I long to be as forgetful as the Atlantic
To hold the multitudes within my salty blood
Breathing tides streaming over shingle
The last home for the lost and wandering
An embrace as cold and indifferent
As a howling norwester
Icy prow’d, high cleaving waves lapping
The edges of iron sky
Chalice gathering all the tears
Falling stately from widow’s walks.

I used to dream that I was alive
That there was steel in my hand
When blood would sing
The breath of my brothers a cloud above our heads
Life bright and hot amidst
Red, bright death
Singing hymns to harps and ringing blades
The taste of fear upon the lips
Pounding wings of crows
Beating in time with hearts and limbs
I used to dream I was a hero
Clad all in blood and gold
All my murders were justified.

Bloody, smeared lip prints
Fresh wounds gaping
Deep and red and rich
As split pomegranates full and fine
There is pain in you
Your body is the pure scalpel
Cutting heart deep, bone deep
Peeling bright ribbons
To hold back the untamed of your hair
Lashes to bind to hips and belly and breasts
Your creature, carvings of your hand
Shaping each moan
Pulling at the spine, nerve endings hot wires
Slaves to your pretty, viscous mouth
Servant to the narrow liver distance
Between cruelty and beauty
Holding all of one body’s universe
Beneath dainty, dripping tongue
Streaked, red war paint run through with sweat
Every precious drop fire over raw, urgent gasping
Mumbles and fumbling, a writhing at your feat
A trembling between heated thighs
Pulling a beautiful, bloody arch
Described between your victim and crumpled soaked sheets
Lost to the gulf of release, strangled cries
Every fibre taut, straining, arrow shot
From the bow of you
A body spent, a burnt offering to your majesty
Oh, to be left such horrible, beautiful ruins
Upon the alter of you.

There is no conceivable measurement
Of the distance between where I am
From where I saw myself
A gulf of time and regret
Bad decisions and inaction
Old ghosts and fading memories
A scattering of busted toys
Tumbled about my feet, littering the floor
Around my chair.

Music plays faint and scratchy
Popping and hissing through the dusty silence
Voices that never fade out
Crackling reminders spinning out and on
Needle cutting tracks out of my fingerprints
Smudging bloody over skin
Smears of bright color across sepia
Twisting smokey though amber whiskey lense
Choking down fire to bitter ashes
We all do fall down…don’t we?

Rags and feathers
These instruments of faith and sex and God
Right, isn’t that how the line goes?
I was beautiful in my brokeness
But you twist yourself into those shapes of damage
And it sticks, limbs twisted
Into driftwood gnarled water carvings
Bones have memory and are hard to untangle
Too brittle, snapping under the weight of scrutiny.

Time passes like a razor
Slicing paper thin, peeling a rind
Of blank tape, spooling out
In meaningless ribbons just waiting
For a random spark
Something hungry to move from me to nothing
Faintly flickering orange greedy tongues
Leaving an empty chair
In a dusty room
With a scattering of busted toys at its feet.

I wish I was a character from a Tom Waits song
Rumpled and whiskey soaked
Populating seedy dives
With a billion stories tucked in the creases
Along with a battered postcard
Smeared with tear stained ink and a bloody thumbprint
Nothing but a busted suitcase
Full of rusty odds and ends
Spilling from a clanking calliope ribcage
Trailing smoke, wheezing into the bell
Of a dented trumpet
As I hold up a lamp post
Playing a broken fingered waltz
Out into the thick sticky fingered air
The stubbed out fag end of Saturday night
Tom cat howling to the moon riding tatter sail clouds
Pork pie hat low on shifty brow
Forgotten new years confetti spangling the brim
Another lost and broken
Street corner preacher
Fumbling out loose change
Or just fumbling with myself and hungry wolf grinning
At the corner girls gleaming like razor blades
Just as likely to cut as to kiss
Leave me bleeding out into my alligator shoes
One more Romeo
Fading out into the disreputable shifty eyed dawn.

emisformake
The blog of my sissy-poo and the person responsible for me creating my own blog…so you can all blame her and while you’re at it check out her fantastically insane levels of creativity and talent